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Friday, July 31, 2009

NOTE from DearMRYTLE: Our friends at Ancestry.com have been busy adding new historical content and fine-tuning their new Member Connect project, both topics of interest to genealogists.

FROM: Anastasia TylerDearMYRTLE,

Yesterday we launched an exciting new feature on Ancestry.com called Member Connect – which will allow Ancestry.com members to more easily connect with others working on the same family lines. You’ll find elements of Member Connect throughout Ancestry.com, especially in the new enhanced image viewer where you’ll be able to see if other Ancestry.com members have saved the record to their Member Tree and/or made comments or corrections to the record.

David Graham, product manager for Ancestry.com, described several details of Member Connect in the Ancestry.com Blog. In addition, Eric Shoup, VP for Product, also discusses some further details of Member Connect in his update at the bottom of this email.

Ancestry.com Content

New and Updated Content on Ancestry.com

Virgin Islands Slave Records

In collaboration with the Virgin Islands Social History Associates (VISHA), Ancestry.com has launched one of the most significant online collection of Caribbean slave records detailing nearly 200 years of St. Croix-Virgin Islands history. The first installment of this collection includes the U.S. Virgin Islands St. Croix Slave Lists (1772-1821) and Population Census (1835-1911), which together contain information on more than 700,000 slaves, owners and family members. Read more in the Ancestry.com blog.

Here’s a preview of some of the Collections Coming soon to Ancestry.com:

Jewish Collection UpdateDescription: New collections from 2 new Jewish content partners (to be announced in August) and more great content from our current partners JDC (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) and JewishGen.org.

Immigration Collection Update

Descriptions: Large additions to our U.S. Naturalization Originals and the Passenger and Immigration Lists

New York Mortality Schedules, 1850-1880Est. Name Count: 146k
Est. Image Count: 15k
Description: Records from the 1850, 1860, 1870 and 1880 U.S. Census of people who died during the previous 12 months in the state of New York.

New YorkState Passenger and Crew List UpdateEst. Name Count: 320k
Est. Image Count: 27k
Description: Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at Buffalo, Lackawanna, and North Tonawanda, New York, 1945-1974; Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at Rouses Point and Waddington, New York, 1954-1956.

New to Ancestry.com? Long-term genealogist and author of the Ancestry Weekly Discovery, Juliana Smith, will help you find your first family member on a historical record. Note: This webinar is intended for those who are new to Ancestry.com but can also be used as a refresher course for more experienced users. Register online.

The major Product news this month is the launch of two major new features: Member Connect and the Enhanced Image Page.

Just Launched

Member Connect We have been talking about this feature to our members and to you all for over a month now. It is now here and by the time you read this, I am sure there will be lots of feedback from our members about it. In case you missed it, you can read more about the feature here. There are some aspects of this feature that we have not talked about publicly. I wanted to give you the inside scoop on a few things.

What it took to build -This is probably one of the most complex projects that Ancestry.com has undertaken in the last few years. The idea of exposing activities to members that are taken by other members on the site in a timely and relevant manner sounds simple but turns out to be very complex to do at the scale at which we are doing it. Member Connect has taken over a year to go from concept to reality. We have involved a large cross-functional team of Ancestry.com employees to design and build this feature. We have also performed a number of usability tests with members (and even talked to some of you) to get feedback on the concept and its design.

Needless to say, we expect that we will get plenty of valid criticism of this feature once it launches. We will be listening closely and iterating on Member Connect to ensure it meets customer expectations. Let us know what you think by emailing us at memberconnectfeedback@ancestry.com.

What is happening behind the scenes - We have been running Member Connect in an invisible mode on Ancestry.com for over a week now. To give you a sense for the scale at which this system is functioning, in the first 24 hours that we had the Member Connect feature turned on, we saw the following:

·We logged 4.7 million member-generated activities (such as a member saving a record to their tree or uploading a photo)
·1.5 million of these activities were relevant to at least 1 other Ancestry.com member and would be “shareable” in their Member Connect Recent Activity list·Since many of the activities logged were relevant to the research of multiple other members, these 1.5 million individual member activities spawned 18 million individual entries to be published in individual member’s Member Connect Recent Activity lists.
·As a result of this, nearly 70% of our members had 1 or more entries included in their Recent Activity list.
·About 30% had 10 or more entries and about 10% of our members had 100 or more entries.

·All of this in the first 24 hours!

Expected member concerns - There are two concerns that I expect our members to raise initially as they are getting used to Member Connect:
·Overload: A small subset of our members may feel like they are being deluged with data. These members have a few options: 1) They can ignore the summarized homepage recent activity list and focus instead on the recent activity list for a specific ancestor in the tree by going to the ancestor profile page for this person, 2) members can filter their Member Connect activity items through filters we have provided and/or 3) they can turn-off major parts of Member Connect altogether.·Privacy: Some of our members will be concerned that their actions on the site will be seen by others. The reality is that almost everything being exposed via Member Connect is already available on the site! We have just made it easier to find. Ultimately this means that we all can collaborate with each other more quickly and easily to build our families’ histories. All that said, those who feel uncomfortable with this new level of transparency can change their privacy settings here. It should be reiterated that we will still honor tree privacy settings and never share information about people we believe are living.

Enhanced Image Page & Improved Editing - We have talked about this feature in quite a bit of detail here. We initially rolled the Enhanced Image Page to just 12 of our smaller census collections. As we gauge member reaction, we will roll it out to our major census collections.

The inclusion of index pane, Member Connect info and source info right next to the historical image will be great. However, the part I am most excited about is our expanded editing capability. We have made the process of submitting an alternate much easier and we have expanded the number of fields you can edit. Since alternates get included in our search engine, member-submitted modifications make it easier for all of us to find the records we are looking for. Even without these capabilities, we get 30,000 alternates submitted by members to our indexes a week. Will these changes increase this rate by 50%? 100%? 200%? I’ll report back on this in a month or two when we have solid data on this.

Coming Soon

We have a few more exciting features/products coming up in the next month or so.